It’s been a long while since we’ve had an “extreme” baseball series. Sure, we’ve had baseball series, but none of them were anything like the upcoming mixed media project, Tribe Nine!
First announced as a gaming project in 2020 (see the promotional video below), Funimation revealed on their official blog on Thursday, September 30th that they are co-producing an anime adaptation with studio Lidenfilms which will air in January 2022.
Along with the announcement made by Funimation, additional reports have surfaced revealing the primary crew that will bring Tribe Nine to life. Sitting in the director’s chair will be Yuu Aoki (who is making their debut as a director) with Michiko Yokote (who most recently worked on The Great Jahy Will Not Be Defeated!) handling the series composition. The anime’s character designs are being provided by Yosuke Yabumoto (whose only credits including various Duel Masters series), and Masafumi Takada (whose last working credit was for a 2019 series titled Days of Urashimasakatasen) will compose the background music.
The premise of the series is pretty straightforward as extreme baseball is the central theme. In Tokyo, there are certain groups that partake in extreme games of baseball all over the city. As you can see in the promotional video embedded above, these games of baseball are far from ordinary and often involve some pretty brutal violence as a team will do whatever it takes to keep the batter from scoring.
As mentioned previously, it’s been quite a while since we’ve had an extreme baseball series. We’ve had plenty of extreme sports series over the years, but the last baseball action series I can remember is the nearly forgotten series One Outs from the fall 2008 season.
While I’m not a huge fan of sports, I do love sports anime and this one feels like an easy, right down the middle pitch aimed squarely at me. While I hope that the actual anime looks nothing like the promotional video, this is still something that I’m going to keeping my eye on over the next few weeks and months.
Sources: Funimation, A.I.R. on Twitter
